Friday, September 2, 2022

Saturday, September 2, 1922. Anthracite Coal Strike Ends.

 


Country Gentleman, for its Saturday issue, ran the second part of a story that it started the week prior.

It's interesting to note, FWIW, that in depictions of rural children from this era, such as this one, they're commonly depicted sans shoes.  A lot of these illustrations, while romanticized, are fairly accurate, which would suggest that farm children, at least in some parts of the country, did typically omit footwear in the summer.   That certainly doesn't ever seem to have been the case here, however.

The Saturday Evening Post came out with a portrait by Charles A. MacClellan of an attractive, but very serious looking, woman which is apparently entitled "Back To School"

Judge went to press with certainty that at least beer was going to be exempted from Prohibition.


Judge was correct, of course.  Not only beer, but alcohol in general, would come back starting a decade later, although not all at once with a sudden repeal of Prohibition at the national level, as so often imagined.

Interestingly, this has a modern parallel in that what had been constitutionalized, a ban on alcohol, was reversed even though not everyone was in favor of that reversal, leaving the states to sort it out, which they did, but not instantly.  The Dobbs decision effectively does that with another issue.

Whether allowed or not, today, even eventually, it's not now for me, as this is colonoscopy day.  

I've been dreading it and really pondering changing course.  It's not so much the procedure itself, it's the medications they require the day and early morning of which cause . . well. . . diarrhea.  I hate being sick, and I'm not sure if it's worth it.

Having said that, according to something I read, 1 in 23 men get colorectal cancer, which sounds like a lot.  But that's 4.35%, which doesn't.  In an abstract fashion, I feel that everyone ought to get this simple diagnostic tool, but I'm hypocritical enough to be reconsidering it.

Again, it's the diarrhea medication that I'm dreading at the time I type this out.  I'd rather skip eating several days prior, which seems like it ought to do the same thing.

The United Mine Workers and the Policy Committee of the Anthracite Coal Operators came to an agreement for a year, which brought to an end the dangerous strike that had been going on for some time.

Friedrich Ebert, President of the German republic, declared the Deutschlandlied to be the national anthem, but only the third stanza of the song.  It remains the German national anthem today, having regained that position in the Budesrepublik in 1952, again starting with the third stanza.  The militant first stanza was used during the Third Reich.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

An aside about bare feet: H. L. Mencken certainly disdained, if not hated, the South, taking particular aim at Arkansas. In the American Mercury near the end of Mencken's life, the state was described thus: “Arkansas stands for watermelons, the unshaven Arkie, the moonshiner, slow trains, malnutrition, mental debility, hookworm, hogs, shoelessness, illiteracy, windy politicians, and hillbillies.”

Shoelessness and hookworm was actually genuinely related. The parasitic hookworm entered the body through the soles of the feet and in extreme cases sucked enough blood to materially lower the IQs of the infected, especially of children who habitually ran barefoot in the summer. A 1909 Rockefeller Foundation study showed a correlation between the depth of outhouse pits and the prevalence of hookworm, and a campaign was mounted to have all pits dug at least six-feet deep to prevent the parasite from crawling back to ground level and finding a host.

It took many decades, till at least into the 1960s, for indoor plumbing, improved hygiene, better nutrition, and shoes (!) to control the infection.

Tom
Sheridan, WY

Pat, Marcus & Alexis said...

Fascinating!

Anonymous said...

And there is this, from a 2010 UK scientific paper: Background

Epidemiological studies suggest that hookworm infection protects against asthma, and therefore that hookworm infection may have a direct or an indirect therapeutic potential in this disease. We now report the first clinical trial of experimental hookworm infection in people with allergic asthma.

Alas–

Conclusions

Experimental infection with ten hookworm larvae in asthma did not result in significant improvement in bronchial responsiveness or other measures of asthma control in this study. However, infection was well tolerated and resulted in a non-significant improvement in airway responsiveness, indicating that further studies that mimic more closely natural infection are feasible and should be undertaken.

Tom
Sheridan, WY

Pat, Marcus & Alexis said...

Ick! I wouldn't have volunteered for that experiment.